When a $2.8 Billion Data Center Becomes a “Minor Development”
The Signal
A proposed approximately $2.8 billion data center development in Spartanburg County, South Carolina, has become something larger than a local development controversy.
The NorthMark Strategies / Valara Holdings high-performance computing project brings together enormous capital investment, approximately 450 megawatts of proposed on-site natural-gas generation, environmental permitting, land-use decisions, community opposition, litigation and questions about which institutions have authority over which parts of the development.
One of its most revealing elements is surprisingly simple.
Residents challenging the project contend that a development of extraordinary scale was allowed to proceed under a “minor land development” classification rather than undergo the public Planning Commission process they argue is required for a major development.
Meanwhile, on August 27, 2026, the South Carolina Public Service Commission determined that the project's private electricity generation for its own use is not subject to the state's Utility Siting Act in the same manner as a public utility generating electricity for public distribution.
South Carolina environmental regulators are separately reviewing proposed air permitting associated with additional natural-gas-fired turbines.
Different authorities are therefore examining different parts of what is ultimately one interconnected infrastructure proposition.
Each institution may be operating appropriately within its assigned authority. And that may be precisely the problem.
The FORMEX Question
Who underwrites the whole decision?
Not merely:
Can the data center be built?
Can sufficient electricity be generated?
Can the necessary permits be obtained?
Will the project produce tax revenue and economic activity?
The more consequential question is:
What must be clear before a community, developer, capital provider, utility, regulator or public institution is asked to say YES?
That is an underwriting question.
The Data Center Is No Longer Just a Building
The traditional vocabulary of economic development can obscure what is actually being constructed.
A hyperscale or similarly large data center may simultaneously be a real-estate development, major electrical load, energy-generation project, water consumer, telecommunications node, industrial facility, environmental emissions source, tax-base strategy, capital project and long-duration community commitment.
At hundreds of megawatts, the electricity requirements alone can approach the scale historically associated with major industrial or utility infrastructure.
The classification “data center” may therefore be institutionally inadequate.
The asset belongs to several categories simultaneously.
And when institutional systems divide those categories among different authorities, something important can disappear:
The Missing Layer
The whole.
The Spartanburg Paradox
The Spartanburg situation exposes an increasingly important infrastructure paradox.
A project can be legally permissible within one framework, technically feasible within another, economically attractive within another and environmentally reviewable within another—
while still leaving unanswered whether the entire institutional proposition corresponds.
Each discipline can produce an expert report.
Yet expertise within each box does not automatically establish correspondence between the boxes.
The Invisible Gap
This is where the FORMEX™ Economics of Correspondence becomes particularly relevant.
Infrastructure decisions frequently assume that if every specialist validates a respective component, the resulting project has somehow been validated as a whole.
That assumption deserves examination.
Engineering asks: Can it be built?
Finance asks: Can it be funded?
Utilities ask: Can it be powered?
Environmental review asks: Can its impacts be permitted or mitigated?
Economic development asks: What economic benefits could result?
Government asks: Does it comply with existing law?
But none of those questions necessarily answers:
Should all of these assumptions be relied upon together?
That is the correspondence gap.
The Economics of Correspondence
Infrastructure risk does not necessarily reside in any single assumption.
It can reside in the distance between assumptions.
A site may be physically available but lack economically sustainable power.
Power may be technically available but require infrastructure that materially changes project economics.
Private generation may solve one constraint while creating new environmental, regulatory or community consequences.
Tax revenue may be attractive while employment creation is comparatively modest.
Water may be technically available while politically constrained.
A project may comply with current land-use requirements yet produce enough community concern to alter future public policy.
Capital may be committed while the institutional conditions supporting the investment remain unsettled.
Each statement can independently be true.
The project can still fail to correspond.
When Moratoria Become a Signal
When communities consider moratoria or new restrictions on data centers, the response is often interpreted simply as opposition to development or technology.
There may be another interpretation.
A moratorium can be an institutional admission that the existing decision architecture may not be adequate for what the community is being asked to approve.
The important question therefore is not simply whether a jurisdiction is “pro-data-center” or “anti-data-center.”
A more useful question is:
Does the jurisdiction possess the decision architecture necessary to distinguish a good project from a bad one?
Blanket approval cannot do that.
Neither can blanket prohibition.
Underwriting can.
The Emerging FORMEX Opportunity
FORMEX does not replace engineers, utilities, environmental consultants, attorneys, economic-development professionals, planners, financiers or public officials.
Their expertise is essential.
FORMEX occupies a different layer:
Emerging Practice Area
Infrastructure Decision Underwriting™
A technology-neutral framework for determining whether the evidence required for a consequential infrastructure decision is present, authoritative, reconciled, decision-ready and capable of surviving scrutiny.
The function is not to perform every technical analysis.
The function is to determine what evidence is required, who possesses authority over it, which assumptions depend upon other assumptions, where those assumptions conflict, what remains unknown, who bears the consequences if an assumption proves wrong and what conditions must exist before YES becomes responsible.
The FORMEX Infrastructure Decision Stack™
The central underwriting task is not merely completing these analyses.
It is determining whether they correspond.
From Site Selection to System Selection
The data-center industry has historically placed enormous emphasis on site selection.
The emerging environment requires something more:
System Selection.
The relevant asset is no longer simply the parcel.
A site that performs exceptionally on six dimensions and poorly on two may not be a superior site.
It may be an invisible liability.
That changes the meaning of feasibility.
Why This Matters Beyond Spartanburg
Spartanburg should not be viewed merely as a South Carolina controversy.
It is a signal.
Artificial intelligence is accelerating demand for computing infrastructure at a scale that municipal, utility, regulatory and community decision systems were not necessarily designed to evaluate as a single integrated proposition.
Across the country, communities are questioning resource use, utilities are confronting extraordinary new loads, developers are considering private generation, states are competing for investment, residents are challenging projects, regulators are determining the boundaries of their jurisdiction and capital is moving rapidly to capture AI-driven demand.
The technology may be moving faster than the institutional architecture surrounding it.
Emerging Risk
Decision Architecture Risk™
The possibility that a project proceeds with extraordinary technical and financial sophistication while the architecture governing the underlying decision remains fragmented.
The FORMEX 21™ Question
The Spartanburg case ultimately returns to the foundational FORMEX decision standard:
What must be clear before someone is asked to say yes?
For a multibillion-dollar data center, “someone” is not singular.
There are many YESes.
The developer says yes. Capital says yes. The landowner says yes. Utilities and energy providers make decisions. Regulators make decisions. Government makes decisions. Communities live with the consequences.
And future generations inherit what those decisions form.
The underwriting challenge is therefore not simply obtaining another YES.
It is determining whether all of those YESes are being made against the same sufficiently complete reality.
The Strategic Implication
The next generation of infrastructure may not fail because stakeholders lacked information.
That is the emerging space between feasibility and approval.
Between expertise and authority.
Between investment and stewardship.
Between what can be built and what should responsibly be formed.
FORMEX™ calls that space:
And increasingly, that space may determine whether the enormous capital now moving toward AI infrastructure becomes enduring economic value—
or an extraordinarily expensive collection of assumptions that never fully corresponded.
Evidence Base
South Carolina Public Service Commission — Docket 2026-158-E, Concerned Citizens of Spartanburg County and Southern Alliance for Clean Energy v. Valara Holdings LLC.
South Carolina Department of Environmental Services — Valara Holdings High Performance Compute Center project and air-permitting materials, updated August 25, 2026.
Public reporting concerning NorthMark Strategies / Valara Holdings, the approximately $2.8 billion Spartanburg computing center, proposed on-site generation and related land-development litigation.
FORMEX™ analysis distinguishes reported facts from the institutional and strategic implications drawn from those facts.